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We consider the question of how to employ next-token prediction algorithms in adversarial online decision-making environments. Specifically, if we train a next-token prediction model on a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Mehryar Mohri , Clayton Sanford , Jon Schneider , Kiran Vodrahalli , Yifan Wu

We study the problem of online learning (OL) from revealed preferences: a learner wishes to learn a non-strategic agent's private utility function through observing the agent's utility-maximizing actions in a changing environment. We adopt…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-07 Violet Xinying Chen , Fatma Kılınç-Karzan

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

We consider the problem of online control of systems with time-varying linear dynamics. This is a general formulation that is motivated by the use of local linearization in control of nonlinear dynamical systems. To state meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Paula Gradu , Elad Hazan , Edgar Minasyan

Reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has received increasing attention recently. However, existing work has focused on obtaining $\sqrt{T}$-type regret bound, where $T$ is the number of interactions with the MDP.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We study the regret guarantee for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) via distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. In particular, we consider finite episodic Markov decision processes whose objective is the entropic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Hao Liang , Zhi-Quan Luo

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically consider discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we introduce a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that represents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Lenart Treven , Jonas Hübotter , Bhavya Sukhija , Florian Dörfler , Andreas Krause

Incentive design constitutes a foundational paradigm for influencing the behavior of strategic agents, wherein a system planner (principal) publicly commits to an incentive mechanism designed to align individual objectives with collective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Georgios Vasileiou , Lantian Zhang , Silun Zhang

To cope with changing environments, recent developments in online learning have introduced the concepts of adaptive regret and dynamic regret independently. In this paper, we illustrate an intrinsic connection between these two concepts by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang , Rong Jin , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Roman Belaire , Pradeep Varakantham , Thanh Nguyen , David Lo

Stochastic shortest path (SSP) is a well-known problem in planning and control, in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In the learning formulation of the problem, the agent is unaware of the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Alon Cohen , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour , Aviv Rosenberg

No-regret learning dynamics ensure that a learner asymptotically achieves an average reward no worse than that of any fixed strategy. This no-regret guarantee does not determine the value of the asymptotic average reward. Indeed, it is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-04 Hassan Abdelraouf , Jeff S. Shamma

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

As reinforcement learning algorithms are being applied to increasingly complicated and realistic tasks, it is becoming increasingly difficult to solve such problems within a practical time frame. Hence, we focus on a \textit{satisficing}…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Akihiro Tamatsukuri , Tatsuji Takahashi

We study an online contextual decision-making problem with resource constraints. At each time period, the decision-maker first predicts a reward vector and resource consumption matrix based on a given context vector and then solves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Heyuan Liu , Paul Grigas

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

The specification of aMarkov decision process (MDP) can be difficult. Reward function specification is especially problematic; in practice, it is often cognitively complex and time-consuming for users to precisely specify rewards. This work…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Kevin Regan , Craig Boutilier